Will Gisele Bündchen Be Handing Out the World Cup Trophy?

As the World Cup (a.k.a. the month-long period during which your entire Facebook feed suddenly demonstrates a rabid fanaticism about soccer) rolls on, observers have begun to speculate as to who will be handing out the trophy once the tourney comes to a close on July 13. Typically, the president of the host nation—in this case, Brazil’s president Dilma Rousseff—hands out the trophy. But Rousseff is not exactly the most popular citizen at the moment, as she was jeered—in intense fashion—during the opening ceremony last week, as the country has spent some $11 billion on the World Cup while, per the Boston Globe, “tens of millions of Brazilians are poor.” (For more background on the complicated, unsettling World Cup spending situation, John Oliver’s take is worth a watch.)

Anyway, since Rousseff is as popular right now as an Irish soccer fan in a bar for British soccer fans (sorry, our soccer analogies don’t get out much), FIFA has decided to ask Gisele Bündchen, arguably the country’s most famous citizen, to do the honors. According to the Globe, “barring any riots that would make it unsafe,” Bündchen—envy of celebrity-kind—will take the gig, and bring along husband Tom Brady (it is unclear whether Brady will actually present the trophy alongside his wife—we hope so, if only because the country seems to bring out his inner Fred Astaire, and that could add some pizzazz to the ceremony). Bündchen would make an appropriately glamorous trophy presenter given the news that the trophy itself will be encased in a monogrammed, handcrafted Louis Vuitton case, an item which would upstage pretty much any human in the world except for Gisele Bündchen.